Advocacy
Promoting reader development to colleagues
Heads of service also appreciated that certain Branching Outers found it difficult to 'sell' reader development to their peers.
One said that their representative had found 'trying to champion something quite a challenge - it requires being tough. It's difficult if you're not in a position of power and don't perceive positional power.'A second suggested that this difficulty might be due to the fact that 'the staff are often very resistant to being involved in things.'
But in other authorities, the fact that the Branching Out representative was promoting the project to peers was regarded as an advantage:
'It's important to have someone who's a direct service provider. We thought about whether [the representative] should have been a divisional rather than a group manager, but they're not directly responsible for service delivery it was therefore the right decision because of the mix of service responsibilities, but also in terms of her peer group.' ' looking at her post, she's still based in a public service post, so nobody could accuse her of coming up with things from an ivory tower.'
